The emphasis is on the demotic line – a line anyone can make. The drawing could be thought of as expanded crayon mark-making – applied and reapplied so traces of the iterative process continually providing an armature on which to work. My painting is less about craft, and more about discovery, with each mark suggesting another, images collapsing and reappearing with the desire to continue the initial excitement of the first touch throughout the painting.
Clem Crosby, October, 2024
‘…(these works) show a deep affinity with this organic ebb and flow of the field, merging and weaving, peaks, moments of intensity and vortices. Related to this is the direct motion of the whole – the unspooling of the form or gestures across the surface. This relates to a hinterland where drawing and writing relate’.
David Ryan, Clem Crosby – Between Surface and Event, Exhibition catalogue, University of Central Lancashire. 2018
Clem Crosby, The Apostate, 2017
Oil and oil bar on Dibond
65 × 48 ins (165 × 122 cm)
‘…Crosby used to paint monochromes, but in his more recent paintings, it is as if what earlier on would have been a single, all over colour complex, was being untied, it’s weave being opened up for inspection…. informality meets analytic intensity…. the closer they seem to fall apart, the better they are’
Barry Schwabsky, Artforum September 2011
Clem Crosby ,Black Baroque 2020 Oil and oil bar on Dibond mounted on aluminium sub frame 68 x 48 ins (173 x 122 cm)
Martina Geccelli, Bow-Rind – Bowl, 2021
glazed ceramic
Shatters
In Geccelli’s clay works, abstract forms arise from wild, often accidental growth. Over a base of discharged vessels, added elements moving fluidly. These pieces emerge from ‘accidents’; purpose-free parts holding the shambles together. A process of destruction and rejoining creates something resilient. Martina Geccelli seeks immediacy and emotion, forming unique sculptures by combining shapes. Listening to possibilities, she embraces accidental contexts where forms develop, risking further destruction after leaving the kiln.
Similar so in Geccelli’s work with paper; from a single sheet crumbling and cuts form sculptures. When the sheet gets rejoined disorderly, a sculptural form emerges.
Her work accepts destruction, vulnerability, and odd results, an open process leading to one best choice. A composition is hard to see, its rather a growth, a movement- an absence of order. Beauty might emerge.
It holds its personality – it is IT.
Martina Geccelli , Toppled 2, 2023
ceramic glazed
Heaps of broken in between hollowed vessel – amidst a hole in the clutter adapting to space
Martina Geccelli, crumbled 2/2024
paper, paperclips, magnet
Andreas Exner, Gelber Rock / Yellow Skirt , 2013 farbric,zip, pins
to elevate nothing into something…. The work of Andreas Exner
Face to face with a work from Andreas Exner I see nothing but the Thing itself (das Ding an sich) … and so encounter something beyond that which I see. There’s the object that it is … and what it points to beyond…
Andreas Exner – 4 Bilder , Off Hook, Groningen 2023
A dark green triangle of woollen fabric insists that I come closer and enquire of it. What are you? Why are you like that? As such, we are in the realm of human desire – wanting to know something about another being.
A filled-in surface of mute colour makes me smile but I don’t know what the joke is. Openings that are filled in: containers that are satisfyingly full to the brim. They are full only with their own materiality, their own matter – a silent interior.
There is nothing there. There is nothing.
It’s the nothing, this little no-thing that we hold so dear, because it’s always there. Always there but also hidden. An artwork shows this Thing by elevating a little nothing into something grand: it takes any old thing and transforms it into something with dignity, transforms it into something sublime, perhaps.
You might think old clothes, large underpants and toilets are undignified, but in the care of Exner they convey a transcendence that comes from the human subjects, the bodies, they infer or index. There is a substantial kindness at work here, a kindness that tolerates the abject, the refused, the disliked: the sort of kindness we need in the world these days.
I see the stuff of Exner and I feel myself: the coloured works map my body and soul. These works are a writing, and as such are intrinsically social, knitting together the symbolic of language and the real beyond. See there… the word sozial made soft and limp, holes into a patchwork curtain so that it shows its own underbelly. And there… a skirt once worn around a woman’s waist – now a majestic site. And here, the common automobile injected with uplifting colour into the open windows: such an act transforms the suburban street into a venue of mysterious and playful interaction, and transforms the ordinary object, an object of daily commerce and industry, into a Thing of love.
It’s social work: empowering the nothings so that we might have desire for life.
Lizzy Newman 2006
Andreas Exner , Artists Acrylics Brilliant Pink; Fiat 850Andreas Exner, Drei Kleider / 3 Garments
Cedric Christie
Cedric Christie Bonnet
When I look at a Judd, I see a question.
That’s what they were doing then: asking questions like “Could this be a sculpture or is it just an object?”
So how do you ask those questions now? How do you ask the same questions but in a different context? It’s a bit like politics.
Two hundred years ago, someone had the idea to abolish slavery, and through politics, changes were made. Now, in the present day, I can ask the questions “How am I benefiting from the change? – how have those changes made an impact?”
Excerpt from an interview with Katrina Blannin / MASS Sculpture Magazine, Issue 2, 2023
Molly Thomson, Slot and block Medium: Acrylic on panel construction Size: 42 x 40 x 10 cm 2023
My conversation is with the object of the painting and with its hybrid identities. Beginning most often with the simple fact of the rectangular painting panel I place myself in the position of both agent and observer, using acts of cutting, reassembling and pouring to re-form – and respond to – each piece. I am interested not only in the layered facade that is presented, but also in the fact that the painting casts and contains shadows. There is always a delicate balance between control and the unpredictable behaviour of the object, and the process advances by slow increments, mis-steps and revisions. Occasionally work descends from the wall and demands space or even mobility. There is play and sometimes there is humour.
Current work continues to evolve through the setting of a series of problems and displacements in each structure. Interior spaces are often implicated, even if only glimpsed through the smallest of openings, and I am interested in the quiet question that such breaks in the facade might pose. Some paintings may quietly allude to what cannot or shouldn’t be seen, while others flex their joints or extend their surfaces with a touch more expansiveness. Often it can seem to me that order is provisional – something to be tampered with.
Molly Thomson, Red, with opening
Medium: Acrylic on panel construction
Size: 37 x 46 x 5 cm
2022Molly Thomson, Cavity
Medium: Acrylic on panel construction
Size: 34 x 23 x 5 cm
2023
Franziska Reinbothe, Fächer,2023, ca.90x50x12 cm, acrylic on canvas
In painting, I am interested in what usually remains hidden: the back of a picture and its edges. In order to make them visible, I compress canvases, expose stretcher frames or do without them altogether. I stretch, fold, break, cut through and/or sew up my paintings after the painting process is complete. Some of them then protrude far into the room, others have already completely detached themselves from the wall.
Curiosity and impulsiveness, not iconoclasm, are my driving forces – and chance and accident lie close together in my artistic work.
I do not work project-based, but continuously in the process. In doing so, I trust in the making, instead of making decisions that restrict me in advance. What happens if I break the strips of the painting? And what if I subsequently repair them? And what will the picture look like if I use transparent chiffon fabric instead of paint, for example? No matter which of the previous and upcoming image-finding strategies I use: It is always about contemporary painting, its means and possibilities.
Franziska Reinbothe, n.T. 2019/22, ca 62x44x10 cm, acrylic on canvasFranziska Reinbothe, n.T., 2015/22, ca. 93x72x20 cm, ball pen, spray paint and acrylic on canvas
RAUMX London 12.05 – 27.05.2023 Preview Thursday 11.05.2023
Simon Callery, Stura; 2021
Simon Callery
I am a painter. In order to understand what painting can do today I have made works that exist on the margins of what can be understood as painting. I have written the word ‘INVERT’ on my studio wall to remind me every day that I must subvert the established conventions of image-based painting if I want to find new roles and develop new forms of painting. It is my intention that an encounter with one of my paintings is as much for the body as it is for the eye.
I have worked in the landscape alongside field archaeologists on many projects. What I have learnt there I have applied to works made in the urban environment and developed in studio based work. The visceral qualities of the excavation sites have made me sensitive to the physical qualities of landscape and the relationship of material to time.
The paintings share spatial qualities we associate with sculpture and I embrace it. We live in image dominant cultures and it is possible to say that the stress on the visual in everyday life inevitable suppresses the other senses. I am working to give painting a material body and as a consequence, a better awareness of our own.
Simon Callery, Country Register, 2018
born London
Graduated from Cardiff College of Art 1983
Has shown extensively in the UK and internationally since 1990s.
Public collections include: Arts Council Collection, London; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Birmingham Museums Trust. British Museum. European Investement Bank, Luxembourg. Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris. Nottingham Trent University. Stanhope plc. Tate
Forthcoming shows 2023: Inauguration Lo Brutto Stadl, Paris. Arcadia for all? Rethinking Landscape Painting now. Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds. Simon Callery & Vlatka Horvat, Annex14, Zuerich. Space as Duty of Care, Studio G7,Bologna. Ouverture, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome. Simon Callery & Georg Schmidt, RAUMX-London. Simon Callery.Contact paintings, CAB, Burgos. The Surface of Place and the Depth of Place . Rudolfinum, Prague.
Simon Callery, Second Red Mantle, 2021
Georg Schmidt
Georg Schmidt, Higgs, 2018
The exchange with researchers from the field of quantum physics has had an influence on my painterly reflections for some time. At the beginning of this discussion was the question of what the Higgs field is all about. The description of an energetic field struck me, not directly perceptible to us, but with significant effects on our world. It seemed to me as if I had encountered here the paraphrase of an underpainting, as it has been used in painting for centuries. Color as underpainting can be like a Higgs field in the picture as a force field effective. While painting, I am preoccupied with this principle of layering, spatially dynamic processes of colourful relationships that are not commensurable or measurably defined in a state. Further concepts, such as chaos and order, determination and coincidence as well as interactions, spatial movements, dimension and proportions I reflected with the pictorial means of painting. Like a tapestry of sound, this encounter with the theme of quantum physics accompanied me in the studio.
Georg Schmidt, Studio Duo, 2022Georg Schmidt, EA9, 2021 (Watercolour)
Born Lübeck, Germany
1985-1989 Philosophie, Universität Hamburg
ab 1986 Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg
ab 1994 Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
1995 graduated as master student with Gotthard Graubner, lives and works in Cologne and at the Raketenstation, Stiftung Insel Hombroich
2017 Tide, Kunstverein in der Kunsthalle Schweinfurt (K)
2016 Horizont, Galerie Weigmann, Düsseldorf
2015 Flutmarke, Galerie Reul, Bonn
2021/22 Mentor in the Art Mentorship NRW
seit 2017 Annual teaching assignments on the subject of color, FB Architektur, Alanushochschule
Privat and public Collections i.a.:Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf. Kunsthalle Lübeck. Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
RAUMX show from 28.10.2022- until Saturday 12.11.2022 Preview Thursday 27.10 – 6pm
To be in correspondence is to be in active dialogue over
time, with another person. It is most often understood within the context of
writing letters, where a mutual need to maintain and nourish an exchange
delivers repeated response and counter response on the page. A sense of
momentum between two writers might be characterised by asymmetrical flurries of
activity and quieter moments when nothing is said.
This particular correspondence began in
February 2022 between us: Moyra Derby and Della Gooden. It is an ongoing
exchange that will continue up to, and during, the making of an exhibition at
RAUMX, London at the end of October 2022. At the time of writing the exhibition
is three weeks away. This booklet presents a partial record of the last 7
months, it draws on the occasions when we met in person, zoomed, texted, and
emailed.
We noticed very quickly that there is a
shared porousness in our practices: an openness to spatial circumstance, to
architecture, a mutual sensibility for the positioning of a viewer/participant
and an understanding of the duration of experience. Consequently, we also knew
that we would not be taking completed works ready to hang for the exhibition.
Instead, elements would need to be open to being resolved in the space, as a
physical and visual continuance of our exchange; a series of moves and counter
moves, back and forth between our two practices.
Della Gooden, Drawn Solid, 2022 | materials: aluminium bar, white gesso, the gallery wall, and the full architectural context. Dim. Variable
Correspondence carries a sense of
equivalence and comparison, and it was clear that the correlation and
interaction between worked surfaces, material objects, the parts and
positioning of our works mattered. They disclosed our interest in composition,
in the pictorial, in painting and its histories.
Usually there are no spectators to the creative decisions we each make in our studios but In Correspondence positions us each as a spectator to the other’s process. We are trusting each other with the unknown and unresolved aspects of a practice in progress.
Moyra Derby, Room Plan, 2022 | Installation detail from solo exhibition at Studio 3 Gallery, Canterbury
When it comes to the installation of the exhibition at RAUMX
this is particularly the case because we will be obliged to take on board the
complexities of a social and spatial dynamic as the works start to correspond
directly in the space, and are changed through that exchange. There will
inevitably be turn-taking, sequential adjustments and edits, and a mutual
responsiveness to the material qualities or tonality of the elements we each
bring. In this process we are interested in the value of shared attention,
which can open out an experience, redirect it and re-tune it.
To be in correspondence with a trusted person can offer a ‘differencing’ from the life we otherwise lead. It can be a space for collusion and revelation, for a different reality. The exhibition In Correspondence at RAUMX will be the outcome of an exchange lasting over 8 months. This project presents a challenging ‘differencing’ from the practices we each have and already know.
Moyra Derby
Moyra Derby, Painting Index: 743, 2022 | materials: acrylic on multiple laser cut panels | Dimensions: 13 x 21cm | detail from ‘grid narrative for Sophie Germain’
Born in Omagh, Northern Ireland, Moyra Derby is an artist working with painting and pictorial conventions. Her two solo exhibitions in 2022: Room Plan at Studio 3 gallery in the School of Arts and Grid Narrative for Sophie Germain, in the Sibson Building, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Kent, both mark the completion of a practice based PhD A Cut in Attention: Reimagining Attentional Capacities for Painting. Recent group exhibitions and projects include: After Bauhaus, group exhibition in response to Bauhaus Centenary, Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, 2019; Interval [ ] slide show, Crate, Margate 2022; The Disoeuvre: Household Mix, Roseville, Ramsgate 2022; Notes on Painting II, Koppel Project Central, London 2019; Interval [ ] still: now, Tintype gallery, London 2018; Muster Station: The School of Beginnings, Tate Exchange, London 2018. Recent writing includes The Productive Inadequacy of Image for Contemporary Painting: Image Based Operations in the Work of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R H Quaytman, in The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, Vol 2:1 2021; Models of Attention in the Journal of Contemporary Painting, Vol 5:1 2019; Indexing Notes on Painting, catalogue text for Notes on Painting II, London 2018.
Della Gooden
Della Gooden, One Line, One Ladder, One Painting, 2018 (installation close up) | materials: graphite ‘line 22’, the gallery roof access ladder, and the left-hand edge of Eileen Agar’s painting ‘Untitled’ 1985) | Dimensions variable,
Della Gooden lives and works in London. Her work has a commitment to and a relationship with the pictorial – even though it is often dimensional, and installation based. Recent exhibitions/projects: Thinking Thresholds, with Richard Bell, THEY COME. THEY SIT. THEY GO., London, 2022; Models & Combos, a publication 2022; The Land of Sol, Sol Space, Nouic, France, curated by Ashley West, 2021; This Year’s Model, Studio 1.1, London, 2021; The Undersides of Practice, for the APT SHOTS programme, APT Gallery, London, 2020 co-curated with Catherine Ferguson; Hard Painting x2, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, 2020 (an ACE funded exhibition co-curated with Ian Boutell, Philip Cole, Stig Evans & Patrick O’Donnell); Temporal Objects, Saturation Point, London, 2020; The Secret Life of Stuff, ARTHOUSE1, London, 2018. Writing complements studio work and essays include, amongst others: Surface-things, for Transforming Surfaces at ARTHOUSE1 Gallery, London; Theories of the World in my Head, for Eccentric Geometric, curated by Jo McGonigal & Deb Covell; A Slice of Bright Space, for Hard Painting x2 at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton. In 2005, Della founded VINEspace, an independent project space, and then Gooden Gallery, London – at this time she developed and curated alternative platforms ‘A One Night Stand With…’ and ‘24/SEVEN’.
During May 2022 we are showing Berlin based artist Shila Khatami and London based painter Daniel Sturgis.
Daniel Sturgis
By bringing together and combining references from art, contemporary culture, abstraction and design, Daniel Sturgis’s paintings recognise abstract painting’s contested relationship to the contemporary world. Resolutely two-dimensional, and often visually up-beat, these are paradoxical paintings that reflect on the act of making, the legacies of modernist painting, and the present-day.
Daniel Sturgis Studied Abandon_1,2021 ; 152 x 152 cm
Carefully hand-crafted in flat acrylic paint,
Sturgis’s canvases use hard-edged abstraction as an arena to question the
assumptions and exclusivity of abstraction. His paintings allow order and difference
to happily coalesce. By interweaving ideas of opticality, movement and visual
balance, Sturgis creates both formal and comic tensions. Through the use of small,
coloured dots, visual layering, or by forms being representationally suggestive,
these works contain strong anthropomorphic qualities. Shapes become
sentient, and a visual and theoretical instability is implied.
Daniel Sturgis, Studied Abandon_2- 2021; 152×152 cm
Sturgis chose paintings from the series of Studied Abandon (2021), recognising what he describes as ‘a slight urbanism and toughness’ in their colours and graphic, layered, compositions to be in dialogue with work by Shila Khatami.
Daniel Sturgis, Studied Abandon_3_2021; 95×95 cm
www.danielsturgis.co.uk
Shila Khatami
Shila Khatami, Beinschwarz | 2022 | 250 x 180 cm | Rabbit glue, Acrylic on canvas
The interweaving of art within society is a central theme of my work. I examine the abstract vocabulary in urban space and its references to art history. I then translate these iterations of painting, back into an artistic context.
The materials and the accompanying color palette refer back to the real life, non-artistic applications of these forms, such as a paint bomb or road damage lines.
Loose gestures counteract the rigid geometric construction. The variety of painting in my works can be understood as a meta commentary on painting.
In doing so, I am interested in questions immanent to the picture such as, “What is a picture?;” “How does a picture come into being?” and „From what does a picture originate?“
Shila Khatami https://www.shilakhatami.com
Shila Khatami , Anstrich22|250x180cm|rabbit skin glue on canvas
2022 first exhibition starts with a group show on drawing. Expansion is one characteristic of the works. It is understood as in space taking of a line, a pattern, paint and colour, or even in a truly 3 dimensional spatial way.
Stephan Baumkötter
Stephan Baumkötter, O.T.,
Repetitions, the drawings result from nothing else: Materials, a mere few formats used over and over, even the speed of the movement in drawing is relatively constant. It is always the same and it always becomes something else. Small groups of related works reveal this: Even using the same procedures and employing the same colours, this stable constellation still emerges differently again and again. By themselves, the differences come about during the process of rolling the pastel crayons, because in the act of drawing the crayon becomes deformed through gradual abrasion, and thus, its behaviour during the movement is constantly different. In this way repetition is avoided, differences necessarily present themselves and what comes about can neither be copied nor repeated. For this reason alone each of the works is an unimaginable drawing, one cannot preconceive them. And already for this fact, each of the drawings is a surprise, something unforeseen.
Jens Peter
Koerver “Nothing Specific” from the Catalogue “Bethany Bottrop”
Translation: Elisabeth Volk
Stephan Baumkötter, O.T. 2019
Sotirakis Charalambou
Sotrakis Charalambou – studio shot 2022
I hope to hang several space drawings. The works are made of fibres which are pulled into cords/strings which are arranged/drawn, fixed and suspended in open space. These types of drawings occupy space. They are multidimensional; can be viewed in the round. An extra dimension exists compared to solid sculptural forms in that they are see through. therefore they are not fixed entities. The suspended strings at once interrupt and reveal space; emptiness becoming integral. This type of work come from painterly considerations; to free colour and drawing from the restrictions of edges; the confines of rectilinear geometric flat two dimensional surfaces which become frames and isolate no matter how nonobjective the intention -windows. The Abstract Expressionist called for acknowledging the flat surface to avoid illusion of pictorial depth etc. I attempt to find ways that are not representational or conventionally sculptural. To this end l make works which have real depth in space thus are not illusions of it, of three dimensional space. In contrast, l will show one or two drawings on paper.
Soti Charalambou. Wall piece 22 x 12 x 2.5 cm – Feb’ 2022 fibre series
Raymund Kaiser
Based on my paintings, I became preoccupied with the question what drawing represents for me . When I first transferred the contours of my paintings onto a sheet of paper they immediately became surface . When applied with a paint marker on to tracing paper, it became different. The silver surfaces reflected the light in many ways. Seen from different viewing points with the structures created by the moving contours of the marker new lively images are created despite the use of the neutral non-colour grey.
Only through
‘exposure’ the image becomes visible, like in a photograph, where after
exposure through the negative the positive motif appears. Here a
structure remains in motion on the silver surface. It cannot be fixed. The
translucency of the tracing paper enhances this effect and makes the amorphous
forms seemingly floating. That was what I was looking for.
Raymund Kaiser, TransMark03 (220819) 2019; Lackmarker, Transparentpapier, 70 x 50 cmRaymund Kaiser, TransMark02 (160819) 2019; Lackmarker, Transparentpapier, 70 x 50 cm
Giulia Ricci
The basic structure of my work consists of grids of isosceles right triangles. I arrange, modify and distort their configuration using repetition, rotation, mirroring and other compositional methods. The references of my practice are textiles, tiles and various other patterned man-made artefacts, on a microscopic and macroscopic scale. I am interested in the often unassuming but all-pervading presence of patterns and systems in the places we inhabit and in the objects that surround us. I create multiple focal points through the repetition of triangles within the grid structure and through the ambiguity between figure and ground. I use this strategy to elicit a tactile and spatial response from the viewer. The perception of my work can change significantly depending on the proximity from the surface; from the macroscopic forms created through modification and distortion at one level, to the discrete, quantised units at another, and finally, to the surface texture and mark-making at another.
Giulia Ricci, Orientation/Disorientation no.11; 2016 Rubber stamp archival oil based ink mono print on paper, 70x70cmGiulia Ricci, Orientation/Disorientation no.13; 2016 Rubber stamp archival oil based ink mono print on paper, 70x70cm
José Heerkens. 2021-L40. This Afternoon. oil on linen, 120 x 90 cm. photo Willem KuijpersLucinda Burgess, Difference 2014 Mild steel, polished and rusting. Wall 300 x 16 x 9cm. Floor 240 x 16 x 3cmLucinda Burgess. Difference 2014 – Milled Steel; 240 x 16 x 3cmFloor
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